GOLDEN, Colo., Nov. 10, 2014 – For the first time, Colorado School of Mines is sending a team to compete at the 2014 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl regional competition to be held in Boulder on Nov. 15.
The McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs and the Ethics Across Campus program are sponsoring the Mines team, and all seven members are McBride students. Liberal Arts and International Studies Teaching Professor Sandy Woodson is the team’s coach and Brian Zaharatos, a PhD candidate in statistics, is helping the team prepare for the Rocky Mountain regional competition.
The team includes co-captains Courtney Widhalm (chemical and biological engineering) and Chris Pumford (mechanical engineering); Richard Sebastian-Coleman (environmental engineering); Katie Gann (metallurgical and materials engineering); Melodie Glasser (chemical engineering); Nicholas Dyer (computer science) and Sean McGinley (mechanical engineering).
“I got really excited to try to get Mines involved. The competition asks students to tackle really difficult ethical questions via civilized discourse with others – it's a perfect fit for a campus trying to foster critical thinking and leadership skills,” said Woodson, who has taught at Mines since 1999.
The top two teams from each of the 10 regional bowls will go to the national competition in February during the annual conference for the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics (APPE), the organization that sponsors the program.
The Mines team has been meeting several times per week since Labor Day and working through the 15 cases APPE made available. They are looking for the salient moral issues presented, researching and developing clear positions about each case. Through the exercise, students gain experience in presentation and argumentation skills, are supported by research and fallacy instruction and are exposed to a variety of ethical issues that are not straightforward, much like real life ethical dilemmas.
During the competition, a moderator will randomly pick one of the cases, and each case will have a particular question. Students do not know what the question will be and will have two minutes to brainstorm and develop a response. The team then gets 10 minutes to present its answer. A second team responds. Three judges will ask the teams questions and a complex system of weighting will determine how many teams from each regional competition will attend nationals.
“The students have put in hours and hours of work. They say they're nervous because their opposition will be liberal arts types (such as philosophy majors) who have stronger backgrounds in the jargon of moral theory,” Woodson said. “However, teams are asked to develop an argument that accounts for multiple perspectives, not spout a bunch of ethical theory. So I'm confident they will do well.”
Contact:
Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations, Colorado School of Mines / 303-273-3541 / kgilbert@mines.edu
Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator, Colorado School of Mines / 303-273-3088 / kmorton@mines.edu